The sun was already sunken behind the altered skyline; rays of purple gold light filtered through cracked and crumbling skyscrapers which poured disintegrated concrete and shattered glass into the streets below. Crosswinds swept through the debris, lifting dust and ash up into the air and through the lifeless city.

Sheldon pulled his coat closed, trying to ignore the throbbing in his left hand and keeping his head down. The air was crisp, far colder than he had ever known it to be for a spring day in Los Angeles and in the unnatural silence, the city he had once called home felt alien. A different kind of ache, now in his chest, not new, tore through him once again. His thoughts flit to the small bottle he carried at the bottom of his bag. Not yet. He reminded himself. He needed those to last.

Sheldon longed for home, for the comfort of something familiar. He was almost there, now. Though, the proximity to his goal had turned him careless. He had been traveling openly down the barren road for hours, barely surveying surroundings. Instead, his eyes were lingering on a jaunting crack in the asphalt and suddenly he realized that he had been following it for a better part of thirty minutes, instead of moving with a purpose.

He jerked his head up in a panic. Silence answered him. It was not like him to idle. He felt sick in a way that he had never known before. Like a portion of his soul, no his mind was struck with rot. As a man, he was resolute, decisive. As a scientist, he was diligent in all measures; sharp, steely blade that cut constant and deliberate, until all was whittled away, the solution now clear. He looked around once more. The ruins around him were still deserted. And yet—

Perhaps, he hadn't adequately thought this through. It could be the first time he would make such a consideration. Perhaps his mind was gone even further than he had previously guessed. The thought terrified.

In the distance, the sound of debris falling caught his attention. Was he was truly alone? He couldn't know what might lurk around each and every corner. The possibility was that one of them might still be here. They could be waiting him out. Maybe it was him they had wanted all along. A moment of the possibility engulfed him. His heart was racing and his mind climbed and climbed dizzying circles of height. (They had climbed Mount Wilson and were standing at the end of the ledge. She steadies him, gripping his side. His vertigo forgotten, his eyes only wavering between the crinkle in the corner of her half grin and her lidded gaze as she looked out across the valley. Her blonde locks blow wildly in the mountain winds and he almost smiles.)

He gripped his hands in fists, digging his nails into calloused skin, trying to ground himself but it wasn't enough. Not anymore. Just a few days before, he had her touch to calm his fears. And just a few weeks before that, he hadn't needed it. He took a deep breath. And another. It will be over soon. He reminded himself.

He had thought for some time that he would be prepared for this situation, should it arise. He had always calculated it, planned for the moment, for being utterly alone. The last survivor. But to be it? Truly? He had always believed he his feelings about others would remain ambiguous. Yet now, in this moment, the feeling of agitation would not pass. It was a familiar feeling when things didn't go his way, a tickling unease.

("We can do this. You've seen Battlestar Galactica, what? Like a hundred times?" Her face was perfect symmetry but her smile didn't reach eyes.

"How is this in anyway like Battlestar Galactica? We have no access to a means of flight or interstellar travel, nor—"

And she interrupts his list before he can even really get going. "Sheldon, we're the guys left behind on Caprica: Helo and Boomer," she smiles again, arching her brows a bit, the way she always does when she's trying to convince him to do something unreasonable.

The comparison twists in his stomach. Which one of them is ever pining after someone they couldn't have? And which one is the machine that learned love?)

With dusk upon the city, he walked up the familiar street once more. Even with the facing crumbling down into the sidewalk below, he had recognized the building immediately. Home. Something dark twisted inside him as he stepped over the exposed rebar and into the remains of what used to be the lobby.

Inside, a musty smell lingered, a symptom of a mold infestation, no doubt. The stairs appeared to be intact, though of course given the circumstances the chances that they would remain structurally sound at this point was certainly at least down to a 50/50 chance.

Had it really only been a year ago that he had practically skipped down these very steps and followed Penny out the door, for the last time? (He was explaining the problematic aspects of Winkle's latest publication, as if mattered. As if any of that mattered. Just as they had reach the landing, she turns to him, exasperated, vibrant, her blonde hair bouncing in a strangely fulfilling way that he had only just come to appreciate before-)

No. Not yet. It wasn't time to think about that. Not yet.

He headed up to stairs, barely pausing to acknowledge his neurosis once last time, before taking the first step upwards. The stairs seemed solid enough under his feet.

(Upwards and onwards. He had said it over and over as they trekked over the dense carpet of dead leaves and fallen pine needles. Finally, as his voice reaches soprano levels of hysteria, she turns around her face reading midway to ranting status. "Shut up, Sheldon!"

He doesn't. He can't. Or maybe, he doesn't want to.

"Jesus fucking Christ!" She's gripping his arms now, pinning him into himself. He wasn't aware of her coming closer, suddenly; she was just there, in front of him. And she's leaning in; she smells faintly of smoke and fresh sweat and something sweet that he can't quite decipher. Her lips press against his, slightly open. A question. Yes, he wants this. Yes, and he parts his lips. Penny eagerly accepts this answer; she presses her whole body into him and slides her tongue into his mouth greedily. She tastes sweet like the chocolate M&Ms that they ate when they last stopped and something else, something Sheldon can't quite decipher, something distinctly Penny. She slides her arms around him and it feels like she's grounding him, keeping him from floating away like a helium balloon on a warm summer day.)

He is standing before the surprisingly unchanged blue door. The brass fixture, 4A, stands in the center. Its unlocked and it opens soundlessly. The inside of the apartment is not so untouched. DVDs and collectables litter the floor, the shelving once holding them, tipped on its side. His K'NEX DNA model has fallen over; the pieces lay in a shattered heap next to the couch, intermingling with shattered glass that was perhaps once a light bulb or juice glass that Leonard had neglected to put away. He walked through the mess towards his old bedroom.

He paused at the doorway, staring at Leonard's bedroom door. He still didn't know what happened to his roommate of almost a decade. He was compelled towards the closed door. The room was in a similar state as the rest of the apartment and nothing suggested a hint towards one of the possibilities of what had become of Leonard.

Not everyone was killed. Some were taken.

(A beam of turquoise light appears from the sky. It's beautiful in an ethereal way that Sheldon can't help but appreciate even in the din of violence and destruction that threaten to overwhelm his senses. Penny pulls his into a nearby building just in time to watch as the beam scans the street they had just exited, in front of a group of running people. Sheldon and Penny watch from behind the counter of the seven-eleven, as the people in the street meet the light, and vanish instantly.

Sheldon thinks that the sky should be crackling with energy. But there is such a wrongness in this: a doom that lingers in the silence that follows. It wasn't until later that it has sunk in, that the ache in his shins reminded him that this wasn't a game of Halo and he couldn't restart tomorrow.)

Leonard's room is warm and still. His sheets spread relatively neatly under debris from the ceiling. Strange, to be here in his best friend's room without him. It felt like an invasion. He had never imagined he would miss Leonard, or Raj or even Howard. How should he be the one to live, he wondered. Of all of them, how was it that he was the last one standing? Once he would have attributed it to the obvious: his superior intellect.

Sheldon had only been five years old when he realized he was different (He always had known that he was special. His mother used to whisper it into his neck as she tucked his blanket around him every night). No, that wasn't right either. He knew he was different. Missy and the neighborhood kids hadn't struggled to let him know that and oh how he had longed for adequate companionship (he remembered how eager he had been to get on the bus that first day) but it wasn't until his first year in kindergarten that he understood what it truly meant to be so different.

But for all his intellect, study and research, he had a poor temperament for living through a dangerous situation. His routine was severely out of sorts. And he had been far less physically prepared than he would like to admit.

But Penny had dragged him along. She refused to leave him behind even when it would have clearly been more beneficial for her.

"Love is a series of electro-chemical signals inside the brain," he said the words aloud. "Nothing more."

It did not convince.

In Sheldon's own room the bed was still made perfectly, defiant against the chaos of the rest of the apartment. Through most of his Star Trek memorabilia was collecting dust on the ground, along with his Green Lantern lamp, now shattered into hopeless disrepair.

He sat down on the bed and looked around at the remains of what was once his life. They took everything, he thought. A primitive pain tore through his body, so intense he fell to the floor among the shattered toys he once held so dear and for the first time since his childhood, felt shame and longing in a way that he had never really understood before. This is it, isn't it, he thought.

They came and they took and they left. And they took everything.

And Penny, with her ridiculous ideas and her overly strong hands and her addicting taste, brave beautiful Penny: she was Starbuck in her own right. He would never be Helo, he was always Baltar and now he was lost and completely alone. Of course she wouldn't want this, want him to give up like this. And he had tried, he really had.

("A girl from work told me about it."

"One of the other waitresses at the Cheesecake Factory owned a vacation home?"

"Fine, it was Kevin, the lawyer," a beat. "We went on a few dates last year and he took me to the cabin for a weekend getaway," His lip must have twitched at that. "Look, it was really well stocked," she looked at him, expectantly.

"Okay, Penny, I believe you," he did.)

He doesn't know when he first started believing in her. One day they were two strangers and the next she was there. And for all of the fictional scenarios he had envisioned in his head, all of the calculations and theoretical possibilities, nothing prepared him for that epiphany.

(She was the one who had instinctively run towards the sound of the explosions, only a the same sense of danger which helped Sheldon get through his adolescence intact forced his hands to her arm. "Wait," his fingers dug into her wrist. Soon after, they saw the first one, a monstrously tall and vaguely humanoid creature with pale bluish gray skin that seemed to stretch over sharp bones. Though their bare skeletal chests seemed frail, he had seen what they were capable of. In place of a face was a plain black mask, a gas mask, perhaps. He had watched as the creature held its victim, a graduate student – Wilkins, by the neck with one gaunt arm and ripped the life from his heaving chest.

It was Anything Can Happen Thursday.)

Of all of his friends, his acquaintance it wasn't Penny that he always imagined would survive the apocalyptic scenario with him. Despite this the feeling of rightness remained. Together, they were strong. He felt safe.

He was still hunched over on the floor. Broken ceramic dug into the palms of hands and his knees. I'm in the wrong apartment. It was a fleeting though, more like a feeling. He stood and darkness crept up around his vision, threatening to overwhelm him. He fought it off.

Sheldon hesitated for a moment in the doorway to her place. The apartment looked nearly the same as it ever was an yet, something was missing. The strong scent of mildew seemed to flow into his pores. It was the smell of disuse, or something old and forgotten. And Penny: Penny was gone.

The inside of her bedroom was brightly lit from the South-facing windows.

A thin layer of dust was settled on top of room. Sheldon stepped over a pile of clothes and sat down on the purple duvet sending a cloud of white into the air. It wasn't right.

With a sudden gust of energy he stood and ripped back the dirty blanket and threw himself face first into the bed, hoping somehow that something familiar would reveal itself to him, a blonde hair, that familiar and distinct Penny smell, willing to feel close to her once more. There was nothing. The sheets slightly damp, smelled only of the same dankness that permeated the building.

Rage flowed through him. All he wanted was this one last piece of her. He tossed the pillow across the room where it landed with a quite thump. Unsatisfied he stood, knocking over the blue nightstand. The lamp smashed against the wooden floor, glass pieces scattering. Hadn't they taken enough? Hadn't they already won? Punching the wall, Sheldon lets go a guttural cry.

He tears through his bag in a rush and pulls out the orange bottle. In his haste to rip off the lid, the bottle slips from his grip sending tiny white pills flying, mixing in with broken glass and plaster below.

Without thinking he falls to floor and plucks as many as he can find back, one by one.

Is this it?

Is this really it?

Pills in hand, he collapses onto her bed once more, defeated. Dust billows and sticks to his wet cheeks. He feels dirty.

(They were huddled in an empty convenience store 20 blocks away from the apartment building, though nothing else about their situation suggested convenience. Filthy, dirty, disgusting. He took a deep breath, a calming breath and reminded himself that he was doing the logical thing, which needed to be done in order to survive. Sometimes, it still helped.

Outside in the street, just a few meters away, a horde of alien warriors continued to ravage their once great city. Sheldon closed his eyes but it didn't block out the deafening roars, the sounds of metal crunching or the screams.

The first time they had hidden from them, in the streets, after they had left campus, he had tried to imagine the sounds were coming from a loud game of Halo. He had thought that a brief respite from the reality of their situation would calm him. It hadn't. Instead, it had made his life feel suddenly, incomprehensibly meaningless. Penny had pulled him close. Her breath had been warm against his neck.

It wasn't until later that it sunk in, that the ache in his shins reminded him that this wasn't a game of Halo and he couldn't restart tomorrow. He reached for Penny's hand. It was warm and soft in his grip. They had been together now for ten days, unable to reach home without being detected. Still, he was already used to it; to being comforted by Penny's touch. She hadn't commented on his obvious mental breakdown.

Once the monsters had passed she turned to him. "Why are we going home, Sheldon?" she pursed her lips, "Shouldn't we be leaving the city?"

He couldn't argue. It was the logical thing to do. The others, if they even lived, would only slow them down, attract more attention to them. Now, of all times, was the time to be logical, wasn't it?

Driving was absolutely out of the question. They had watched as the laser weaponry of the invaders disintegrated anything that moved in the streets. They couldn't just walk out of the city, either. They had to sneak out, skittering through dark alleyways, in the shadows of the rubble that had been made of the Los Angeles skyline. They were almost caught, twice.

Penny had pulled him back this time before one of those things could see him.

Why had they come to Earth? If they were interested in stealing our resources why didn't they just get on with it? Why were they so concerned with hunting down and destroying every human being they came across? Sheldon couldn't piece together a reasonable conclusion. There wasn't enough information, he concluded. But that was a self-serving lie. In his heart he knew the truth. They simply were destruction incarnated. Shiva, come alive as a race of masked monsters, or something like that, if he believed in gods.

The night that they finally made it to the outskirts of the city, they slept in the backroom of a restaurant that still stood, though the front half was demolished. Sheldon no longer had to force himself to pretend he was laying on sterile sheets as he rested his head on Penny's lap. She whispered to him, though he only half heard the words. When she knelt closer, he didn't move away.

She pressed her lips against his forehead. Soft. For the first time, he understood. It was the inflection in her voice, the mouth that formed the words of promises she couldn't possibly keep. It was a reminder of home when everything seemed lost. It was the suddenly just so clear.

"Penny."

"It's okay Sheldon. I'm right here."

Fin.